The Magnitsky Act
Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian tax accountant who acted for an American client Bill Browder who went to Russia as a hedge fund trader. He discovered an incredible identity theft – fraud – that Bill’s companies had been used without his knowledge by a syndicate of crooked police and tax officials, who used them to steal $250M of public money.
And when he reported this massive fraud, the investigators were the very police who’d pulled it off. They arrested him, kept him in prison for a year without trial, thanks to lick-spittle judges who ignored the law and ignored his failing health. And he was finally beaten to death in prison by the criminals in the state who had committed the crime that he had informed on.
Bill Browder launched a massive campaign in the West to identify and condemn the 30 or 40 people morally and legally responsible for Sergei’s death – the police, the tax officials, who were now busily laundering their money through Cyprus and London, and the supine judges who had cruelly denied him bail. Browder named them and shamed them in a massive campaign. One policeman, on a salary of $300 a month, paid $2M to English lawyers to sue Bill for libel. The case was eventually thrown out and Bill took his campaign to the United States.
In June 2012, the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs reported to the House a bill called the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012. The main intention of the law was to punish Russian officials who were thought to be responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky by prohibiting their entrance to the United States and use of their banking system.
In a rather puerile, self-defeating response to adoption of the Magnitsky Act in December, the Russian government denied Americans adoption of Russian children, issued a list of US officials prohibited from entering Russia, and posthumously convicted Magnitsky as guilty.
Australian expatriate jurist Geoffrey Robertson, who represented Browder, has described the Act as “one of the most important new developments in human rights”. He says it provides “a way of getting at the Auschwitz train drivers, the apparatchiks, the people who make a little bit of money from human rights abuses and generally keep under the radar.”
In November 2013 he gave the 2013 Human Rights Oration to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With apologies to the raconteur, I have attempted to condense his words of wisdom into a couple of pages with the odd comment thrown in.
“If we shrug our shoulders and say, as the Australian Prime Minister said in Colombo a couple of days ago – I quote – “Sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen”. Human rights atrocities are not “difficult things”. They are evils, and the Universal Declaration enjoins us to condemn them.”
Robertson spoke of Australia’s pivotal role in the drafting of the Human Rights Universal Declaration through Doc Evatt and his team.
“Article 25 was very much an Australian inspiration – the right to an adequate standard of living, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and benefits in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood or old age.”
He goes on to ask who guards the guardians – “the Australian guardians who thought it right to hack into the telephones of our Indonesian allies”.
“Well, who guards the guardians? This … we have Edward Snowden to thank for revealing that we live in the world that Orwell dreamed of, where there is no hiding place for any electronic communication. He revealed the Prism, which picks up your conversation if you use any one of 70,000 key words that it automatically hoovers up for storage and subsequent reading. If you say “Bin Laden” on your telephone conversation with your lover, that will be swept up. If you say “Assange”, it will be swept up. And there are 70,000 other words that Prism is calculated to pick up. Now, not only conversations of that kind. At some point the decision makers – we don’t know quite who they are – in the arrangement, which is basically Britain and America, with Australia, Canada and New Zealand thrown in, decided it would be a good idea to pick up the conversations – the private conversations – on mobile telephones of world leaders, beginning with Angela Merkel.
None of this has anything to do with terrorism. It has to do with picking up gossip and tittle-tattle and feeding that to politicians. That’s what it’s all about. And, of course, it is ironic that the first public victim – I say public because I understand there have been a lot of private victims, who maybe even don’t know that they’re victims of the gossip and tittle-tattle – but the first public victim was none other than General Petraeus. He was the best solider that America had. He was about to be made head of the CIA. And on his metadata, which is the records they could get of everyone who ever calls him or he ever calls, they discovered that he’s been having an affair with his biographer, which disqualified him from the CIA.
Well, now we have DSD, our defence intelligence service, and the revelation of the fact that in 2009 they were boasting – and I’ve seen the document, and it is really a very boastful PowerPoint presentation – of how they, the intelligent Australians, were able to bug the mobile phone of the wife of the Indonesian ambassador. My first instinct – my first advice – was, “No, this is some sort of plant”. I mean on every page they had this moronic, puerile motto stamped heavily, “Steal their secrets. Keep ours”. I said, “These are intelligent Australians. They wouldn’t have a motto as corny as that on every page”. Well, of course they do. And this is interesting because if you think about it, there is nothing to do with terrorism, there is nothing to do with Australia’s national security, that could rationally be gleaned from the mobile phone of the wife of the Indonesian Prime Minister.
What d*ckhead made this decision? Because look at the consequences.”
I would suggest it was the predecessor of the d*ckhead who just upped our security alert to high.
“I looked at the Australian Security Act last night and, bizarrely, there are some protections for Australians, but basically DSD can do what it likes to non-Australians.”
This was before the Abbott/Brandis announcement about retaining all of our metadata.
“There is this James Bond idea that they’re licensed to kill, they can be licensed to do anything, and we give them a carte blanche because we think that they’re spending their time on terrorism. Quite clearly they’re not. In this case they were spending their time on tittle-tattle, and hoovering it up from the Australian Embassy in Indonesia, which was a breach of international law, a breach of the Vienna Convention, and even more interestingly, I think, a breach of the Australian law.
Who issued an authorisation requiring the tapping of the telephone of the Indonesian politicians and the Prime Minister’s wife? What happened to oversight?
How come the guardians of the intelligence service, set up by the Hope Report, failed so abjectly to identify this improper behaviour and to deal with it? The Inspector General of Security, the Parliamentary Committee, there’s even a Ministerial Security Adviser – all statutory positions, all guardians who have failed in their duty to ensure that Australian intelligence collects intelligence on our enemies, and not the tittle-tattle from our friends.
Or did we just do it because the Americans told us to?”
Robertson then goes on to discuss gunboat diplomacy, “by which I mean giving gun boats to unrepentant human rights violators.”
“So Sri Lanka claims that the human rights situation has improved markedly. That’s a lie. Two Human Rights Committee resolutions on the country’s human rights and the lack of accountability have been met with silence. This August, the UN Commissioner, Navi Pillay, reported that Sir Lanka curtailed or denied personal freedoms and human rights, that the country’s leaders still acted with impunity in the absence of the rule of law. And she describes an environment of increased militarisation, enforced disappearances, violence against women and religious minorities, silencing of opposition voices, and increasingly fearful press. And in the lead up this year to the Commonwealth Conference, the government destroyed the independence of the judiciary.
Well, Australia donated its gunboats and Mr Abbott defended the government. I quote, “Sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen”. Like killing 70,000 civilians. Anyway, it seemed to be a long-winded paraphrase of Donald Rumsfeld’s “stuff happens”. But genocide is not stuff. It’s not a difficult thing that happens. Nor is torture or mass rape or mass murder. These are breaches of a universal law, which must, when they happen, be universally condemned by every state that takes its international obligations seriously. And I don’t make this as a party-political point: turning a blind eye to Sri Lanka human rights breaches was just as much Bob Carr’s policy as Julie Bishop’s.
But their thinking is … this seems to be the thinking of Australian governments that this will somehow help to stop Tamil asylum seekers. Now I think this is a very foolish, and actually very ignorant, approach, for two reasons. Firstly, because the history of human rights proves that you can’t deal with leaders who are mass murders. They always lie and cheat and make promises they’ve got no intention of keeping. Of course the patrol boats will be used for the purposes of the Sri Lankan navy, whether it’s shelling civilians or having fireworks displays when the judge is sacked. Human rights violators can’t be trusted not to violate human rights again and again. A second reason is, quite simply, the only way to stop people seeking asylum is to end the persecution that makes them seek asylum and risk their life in doing so.
Most human rights violators act because they don’t fear retribution. They’re not political and military leaders; they’re merely what one might term “the train drivers to Auschwitz” – the judges, the policemen, soldiers, public servants, utterly necessary to the commission of crimes against humanity, but not important enough for the international community to put then on trial. But lives might be saved if they decided not to act, or decided to act differently.
And over the past year or so we’ve come up with a way to deter some of these willing tools of oppressive governments, who make money from their abominable acts and store it in countries where they can take advantage of the banking system and the school system, and even the hospital system. This is called a Magnitsky law. And, really, every civilised government should have one. And it’s becoming a campaign objective. The US has taken the lead. Many European countries are planning to do the same. And Australian could and should move in the same direction.”
Robertson sees this as a kernel for a movement to support global integrity and justice. His entire speech can be read here and could I also recommend, as I have before, Ted Mack’s Henry Parkes Oration delivered around the same time. These men give one faith that the world is not full of corporate puppets like Tony Abbott.
21 comments
Login here Register here“the Australian Prime Minister said in Colombo a couple of days ago – I quote – “Sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen”.” If that one statement doesn’t prove he’s totally deluded and off with the fairies, nothing will.
babyjewels,
This is from the man who said ten years ago,
‘‘Abortion is the easy way out. It’s hardly surprising that people should choose the most convenient exit from awkward situations.’’
His exit was off to Oxford, you deal with it. He also said that contraception was wrong because it was usually part of a “me now” mentality. This from the champion of “me now”.
On the basis of your comments, maybe ole Tone’s problem (not meaning any disrespect to anyone else) is that he is schizophrenic. One side of him says one thing and means it, and then another comes out and trumps it with contradictory and uncomplimentary conduct.
I can’t come up with any other explanation for such blatant hypocrisy that lacks total insight of what motivates one’s own impulses and conduct.
The blog is so convoluted in its strange story, you would think this is book material? for a grasp on how all this can be.
“These men give one faith that the world is not full of corporate puppets like Tony Abbott.”
It’s what keeps some of us going. That and hope, trust even, in the young ones coming up behind us.
Maybe as a form of civil disobedience we should all use the words Bin Laden and Assange every time we phone, email or text???
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People think i'm joking when I tell them that Abbott is a moron.
Kaye I had an nasty little cynical thought. What if lots of people, by that I mean a mass movement, regularly typed, emailed, phoned or text a list of scary key words in a variety of sequences so that they could not be easily filtered. That would surly screw up the works somewhat. In fact if things get out of hand that may be one solution to this unconscionable invasion of privacy.
“Sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen.” “Shit happens.” I am gob-smacked at the lack of media and academic attention by psychologist, sociologist and linguist at the deep underlying subconscious implications of these comments. Abbott is totally off of his rocker if he thinks these quotes are any way acceptable in a modern sophisticated democracy. He is tacitly approving murder and genocide. Good lord have we come to turning our backs so easily by ignoring the blatantly obvious lack of concern and consideration for anyone who gets in the way of Abbott’s agenda. Is not his lying, treatment of the unemployed, elderly, workers, refugees, homeless, youth, the working poor and disenfranchised women the very sign of a completely callous and mentally challenged disturbed personality.
Clearly the point of these quotes is the blatant re-framing of the facts to meet his twisted objectives.
My country my country wherefore my country.
@Jennifer Meyer-Smith – September 14, 2014 at 7:52 pm
… maybe ole Tone’s problem (not meaning any disrespect to anyone else) is that he is schizophrenic. One side of him says one thing and means it, and then another comes out and trumps it with contradictory and uncomplimentary conduct.
I can’t come up with any other explanation for such blatant hypocrisy that lacks total insight of what motivates one’s own impulses and conduct.
As an amateur psychologist I’ve been fascinated as to how Abbott’s mind works. Some people reckon he’s a narcissist or a socio-path and he certainly appears to tick a few boxes along those lines. But, being a tad knowledgeable of personality disorders (eg DSM IV and now V) it’s not so easy to fit him into any of these categories.
Schizophrenic? Not sure. It may be a more like a dissociation disorder syndrome – as in Syble or The United States of Taura. This is quite different from Schizophrenia with ‘voices’ and the like.
Abbott appears as an odd mixture of persona. At times he seems genuinely caring. At others he’s a political manipulator. It’s as though these two aspects of his mentality have no awareness of one another. This I think is what you’re getting at Jennifer MS.
Whether Abbott is a narcissist, a sociopath or a DID’s sufferer it’s a bit of a worry that he’s at the helm.
—-
BTW. Here is a clip by Katie Lee that was used in an episode of The United States of Taura for those who like psychological humour. It’s from her album (1959) titled “Songs of Couch and Consulation” which has a bunch of brilliant songs about matters psychological like, say, “Repressed Hostility Blues”
‘‘Abortion is the easy way out. It’s hardly surprising that people should choose the most convenient exit from awkward situations.’’
Oh you mean like adoption?
100 years ago there was just one word, “Lunatic”, perhaps we should just use that when describing him.
We have a catch-all term now – dick.
‘Personality’? He hasn’t got a personality, take away the robust physicality and there is the classic catatonic absence of humour and passion.
BTW, I saw a meteorite over Newcastle about 7.15 last night.
A bott is evil. Full stop.
Kerrilmail, we used to do that way, way back when Echelon reared its ugly head.
There were so many phone conversations using the word bomb like ‘we have a paddock bomb’ and ‘our old bomb has had it so will have to buy another one’.
The old Echelon was so bad we could actually hear it click in 🙂
A while ago I wrote an article called message in a bottle where I said “Capitalist fundamentalists have taken over my country and are carrying out a jihad against anyone who earns less than $80,000. Please send help.”
If I type the word banana you will know that a white van has pulled up outside the door.
You should have made a sticker 🙂
Stop A Bott
Paul,
I like your description of Abbott as, “lunatic”.
Pity his poor Mum and Dad didn’t call him something starting with L, then we’d even have alliteration to assist us with this very apt description.
(I so hope his minders read this blog.)
To call Abbott a hypocrite, liar or moron misses the point and seriously under estimates the danger facing Australia.
Abbott is a single-minded bully and narcissist, gaffes and buffoonery aside, who craves power and has enough rat cunning to surround himself with like-minded religuous/Ideologically-driven sociopaths. Collectively, he and his A-team are the most dangerous grouping of extreme right-wing politicians of a fascist hue that I’ve experienced in 50 years of voting in Australian elections.
Claudio,
the humour of calling Abbott names relieves the tension of knowing, if Australia doesn’t make a stand, our subjugation under Abbott’s LNP Government will be prolonged.
That’s why I want an alliance between Labor and the Greens. That’s also why I’m pleading with Labor to make a stand now. Both actions will bring more people to their fold and they won’t lose those of us, who are frustrated by their lack of action so far.